'First there is trust, then passion, then death': Why
the 'Virgin Queen' never married
Neil Armstrong
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, is the only English
queen never to have married. The iconic Tudor
monarch's last visit to Kenilworth 450 years ago may hold
some clues to her solo reign ? as revealed in a new art
installation at the castle, depicting betrayal, beheadings
and an elaborate declaration of love.
On a July evening in 1575, 41-year-old Queen Elizabeth I
arrived at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, UK, for
what would be her longest and last visit. She had given
the castle to Robert Dudley in 1563 and granted him the
title of Earl of Leicester the following year. Dudley was a
great favourite of the Queen and is thought to have been
her childhood friend. The precise nature of their close
relationship was the subject of much gossip.
Prior to the unmarried Queen's arrival, Dudley had given
the magnificent castle a major refurb. New buildings had
gone up, a new garden had been created and the estate
had been landscaped. And the earl pulled out all the
stops to lay on extraordinary entertainment in the form of
music, dancing, acrobatics, spectacular fireworks and
dramatic interludes performed by costumed actors. On
the huge mere surrounding the castle, there was a
moving island inhabited by the "Lady of the Lake". There
was a 24ft (7.3m) dolphin that concealed musicians, and
an 18ft-(5.5m) long swimming mermaid.
No expense was spared. It cost Dudley £1,000 ($1,400)
a day ? millions in today's money, and the whole
extravaganza has been interpreted as an elaborate and
expensive courtship display; the 16th-Century ruling
class's equivalent of hiring a plane to fly a "Marry Me"
banner. "The 1575 festivities were an attempt to woo
Elizabeth ? marriage is a theme in some of the events,"
Jeremy Ashbee, head curator of properties at English
Heritage, tells the BBC. "Dr Elizabeth Goldring, who has
made a detailed study of Lord Leicester, has called it 'his
last throw of the dice'."
Dudley's gamble seemed to be going swimmingly, but
then everything changed. The highlight of the stay was to
have been a masque ? or performance ? on Wednesday
20 July. It never took place. Was it simply a case of bad
weather preventing the event, as the official version had
it? Or had the monarch got wind of the subject matter
and been angered? The masque featured Diana,
goddess of chastity, searching for one of her chaste
nymphs, pointedly called Zabetta ? a version of the
name Elizabeth.
It concluded with a messenger of Juno, goddess of
marriage, directly addressing Elizabeth, and imploring her
not to follow the path of Diana but to marry instead.
Dudley had a certain amount of leeway with the Queen, but this perhaps was going too far. Whatever the reason,
the masque never took place, and the revelries were
over. The Queen remained in her quarters for a few more
days before leaving on 27 July.
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, is the only English
queen never to have married. She came to power in
1558 at the age of 25, inheriting religious, political and
financial problems from her two predecessors, her
half-brother, Edward VI (1537-1553), and her half-sister,
Mary I (1516-1558).
Advisers and members of Parliament repeatedly urged
her to marry to protect England's security. A woman
ruling alone? Inconceivable. A queen needed to marry, it
was believed, not just to produce a male heir in order to
avoid succession disputes but also so that a man could
take charge of political and military matters. The
entreaties to marry were ceaseless, and numerous
matrimonial candidates were suggested or suggested
themselves. Elizabeth repeatedly parried, deflected and
refused. Why?
It's entirely possible that she simply found the idea of
having to obey or defer to a husband ? any husband ?
intolerable. After all, she was very well educated (she
learned five languages ? French, Italian, Spanish, Latin
and Flemish ? and had studied history and rhetoric),
highly intelligent, proud and fiery. She is said to have
declared: "I will have but one mistress here and no
master."
Also, Elizabeth knew that a woman could govern
perfectly well without a man looking over her shoulder. In
the summer of 1544, at Hampton Court, she witnessed
the scholarly Katherine Parr, Henry's sixth wife, ruling
with full authority while the king was on campaign in
France. Katherine was a more than capable regent, and
Elizabeth seems to have been profoundly influenced by
seeing her stepmother exercising power, and accepting
as her due the humble deference of powerful male
ministers and courtiers.
Besides, her own immediate family had hardly furnished
her with an image of the joys of marriage. Her father had
her mother, Anne Boleyn, arrested on trumped-up
charges of adultery and conspiracy, and then, shockingly,
had her beheaded when Elizabeth was just three years
old. Some commentators have suggested that Elizabeth
might have been afraid of sex.
In fact, Elizabeth enjoyed the company of handsome
men, and could be flirtatious with them. However, she
had plenty of reasons to fear pregnancy and childbirth.
Childbirth was a very high-risk enterprise in the Tudor
era. Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, died in childbirth,
and Katherine Parr died of an illness shortly after giving
birth, as had Elizabeth's grandmother, Elizabeth of York.
But there were political reasons, as well as personal, for
not marrying. Keeping the country free from the influence
of foreign powers may have been a consideration. Also,
the prospect of Elizabeth's hand in marriage might have
strengthened her negotiating position in her dealings with
France, Spain and other nations. Meanwhile, if she'd
married an English nobleman (and Dudley might have been a possibility had not his wife, Amy Robsart, died in
somewhat suspicious circumstances in 1560), she would
have automatically put another English nobleman's nose
out-of-joint.
So she kept everyone waiting and wondering. She seems
to have had an instinctive grasp of what we now call PR,
and liked to present herself as wholly devoted to her
realm. From early in her reign she cultivated the image of
the Virgin Queen. In 1559 she declared, in response to
MPs asking her to marry, that eventually "a marble stone
shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time,
lived and died a virgin".
Had the real Elizabeth allowed Dudley to think he might
be in with a chance? And what did the Kenilworth visit
mean for their relationship? "I don't believe that he felt
humiliated by her rejection of his proposal," says Ashbee.
"He was happy for an official account of the festivities to
be published soon afterwards, and in his will, he
stipulated that the castle was to be left exactly as it had
been. I rather get the feeling that he saw 1575 as his
'finest hour'. He certainly didn't retire quietly into private
life after 1575."
Elizabeth was furious with Dudley for a while when he
married Lettice Knollys in 1578 ? but she forgave him.
When he died, in 1588, she locked herself in her room for
so long that her chief adviser ordered that the doors be
forced open. And when Elizabeth died in 1603, a note
Dudley had sent her shortly before his death was found
in a casket she kept by the side of her bed. She had
written on it "his last letter".
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250714-why-the-virgin-queen-nev
er-married (adapted)
